How to reduce memory usage and free it from running applications

Often i get emails or support requests at forum about either one application or other or the system with too much memory usage and resources or system getting slow and unresponsive. Today I will be talking about a small application which can free system memory from all applications running on your system and do it at regular intervals which can be changed by you. I will be talking about CleanMem, a small application which is a excellent application which does not even use your memory as it doesn’t run in the background reducing your memory usage . (Thanks Grrfor asking me about it)

It is small application which you can forget after you install it. It runs regularly using the Scheduled task feature of windows operating system. By default, the scheduled task for CleanMem runs every 30 minutes. IT just runs, does it work and closes. So its different in one way from other tuneup applications as it doesnt add to your memory problems by running in the background. Here is how it works (In the words of developer himself) ;

First off Cleanmem doesn’t clean the memory from the processes itself! It asks Windows to do that. When the program starts up it grabs a list of running processes. It then grabs the ID of each process and calls the Windows API EmptyWorkingSet for each processes, Cleanmem of course checks the ignore list and skips those processes. Then Windows cleans the process, and once all the processes have been cleaned Cleanmem closes itself.

Lets see if whatever is said about this tool is true when we get to the system and run it. Below is the screenshot showing my laptop’s Memory usage when CleanMem has not run.

And after running CleanMem task, you can see a drastic reduction in memory usage in all the applications.

Just keep in mind, this memory is get freed and after sometime, it will be back again to same level. But as the task scheduler runs it at regular intervals, hence your system will keep getting free memory always.

One thing that most of you will miss or search for in this small application is a GUI (Graphical user interface). It doesnot provide a GUI, but the reason for this is as simple as it doesn’t need a GUI. If you want to change the interval of running this, you just navigate to Control Panel >> Scheduled Task and there you can edit the interval. See the below screenshot for more details.

If you want to be more adventurous, you can exclude any application which you dont want free memory from by adding the Application file executable name in the ignore list and applying the setting. Both the options are available in the program menu in your start menu of windows. IF you are confused about what I am saying, Just browse the CleanMem folder inside program files and edit the files using notepad. They are just simple enough no complications.